Hey everyone, before you read this please be aware this is my working theory on what is happening, and it fits with what I am seeing I may be wrong but I can’t find any other explanations: At this point I have essentially verified this as true by going through logs and backups from a few days ago containing statistics for multiple players.

Short Version: Statistics placeholders were totaling many of your statistic numbers twice (essentially duplicating all your stats) – and now it’s been fixed.

You may have noticed today that some of your stats seem to have “reverted” today. Some of the statistics did not change. To understand what is happening, I have to explain how the statistics on the server work…

Statistics are collected by Minecraft servers for each player, but displaying them within the server is done via a plugin called “PlaceholderAPI (PAPI)”. PAPI lets other plugins use text markers (%like_this%) to parse information and display it. It uses expansions to add different modular sets of placeholders. One of them is the statistics expansion – which we use to display the stats.

I installed this expansion over a year ago. It has worked fine ever since. However, at some point – the backend material names for the Minecraft server software we used experienced a change – and they included new material names, but also legacy material names (Identified with LEGACY_).

The statistic expansion was never updated to account for this. So, it began counting many material based statistics twice. To Be Clear – Your statistics were NOT changed. Those are tracked by Minecraft in the server world files – and I have verified (by pulling old backups and comparing stat numbers for specific players) that the statistics did not get cut in half overnight.

Essentially, The Minecraft server/world statistics simply keep track of every single “material” that you have broke, placed, or crafted (and a few other ways you interact). The placeholders do nothing but grab and “total” these numbers. They do not influence them, or update them.

So, The version of the statistics placeholder we had was about a year old. I updated it today. Then many of your stats changed, and that is when I began researching what happened. I went to the github for the statistics expansion, and found a change listed 2 months ago:

https://github.com/PlaceholderAPI/Statistics-Expansion/commit/9bf9437f1b8c2d68740470bcfeb8014ed12818e5

fix duplicating statistics

This is where I realized what was going on. The placeholder was essentially doubling (Not exactly – but close) your total number of materials that you broke, placed, or crafted. Once I updated the expansion, it only totals the LEGACY materials.

This is why many of your statistics dropped. It may have even changed some of the blocks that are counted against the total. It looks like they are only counting the legacy materials, which I think may not include many of the new blocks. I am frankly very confused by it, and it may be time to find another statistics plugin that includes placeholders we need. That is going to take a lot of time and work – but it’s going on our roadmap (See SRVRM-36 issue on roadmap site).

However, I wanted to let you all know about what was happening. I am sorry if it has disappointed some of you to see many of your numbers drop severely – but I am afraid that it does not appear to be a glitch or an issue, but rather a fix to a long standing bug. If you have any questions or comments, please leave them below.